Memorable, crazy movie

Just what I expected

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I didn't intend to write this commentary but after reading all of the comments I felt I had to. This movie is a work of art showing the miracle of birds and how they live and migrate with you sucked right into the experience rather than viewing it passively from afar. I have watched Attenborough's The Birds and this is better at putting you in the position of being in their feet.Imprinted birds are not tame birds. When birds hatch they imprint on the closest moving thing near them as being their parents. That was what was done here with the birds used in the flying close-ups. The person they imprint on needs to be careful to educate them that not all people will treat them nicely. I watched another film about somebody who raised wild turkeys. In the end he noticed that all of the turkeys except one eventually went on without him. For the turkey that wanted to be near him forever, their parting was violent with the turkey attacking him because he was leaving. But that does not mean that the birds didn't do what they normally would do anyway. The birds were neither tame nor trained except vis-a-vis what their natural parents would do in training them how to fly and stay alive. These bonds can be deep with the birds remembering their youthful care-takers for most of the rest of their lives. But the recognition is a two way street with the person that reared geese in another movie recognizing them from the thousands of other geese flying past a year or so later. And when he called they recognized his voice. That is what imprinting does.One negative technical point is the Canadian geese flying across Monument Valley. I am sorry, but I have never saw them in that region and I was reared near there. I saw Mallards, Teals and several other duck species but no Canadian geese or Snow geese, But when I was young I didn't see any Bald Eagles there either. The DDT crop spray had wiped the Bald Eagles out in that region. Even Golden Eagles and Buzzards were rare. If anything, this movie shows our actions do have an effect on many species and that we need to be careful so we don't harm them.It is too bad they didn't show that tiny little Hummingbirds that summer in the eastern US actually fly across the Gulf of Mexico to winter in Central America and then back again in the spring. Amazing! The only thing more miraculous is the migration of the Monarch Butterfly. The Monarch's migration isn't explained very well by Darwin's theories. It takes four generations of Monarchs to make a complete migration cycle. What that movie and this one do is show what a miracle that migration is. There are some things in which science misses the whole point. Here the central point is the miracle of birds migration.What would be nice to have in the extras on a DVD is how the four years of creating this changed the people that made it. Evidently it did something to them because it shows in the end product. I could even see that the birds of the same species have individual personalities. The only way you can get that is to live up close and personal with them for a long time.The most stunning thing about this movie is that it sucks you right in so you can see life from the perspective of the birds. For me the music enhanced rather than detracted from that experience.

As the sun sets somewhere along the western coast of Africa, grotesque, spidery silhouettes gang up on a wounded bird. It was difficult to watch. Yet, it was visually mesmerizing. The crabs were hideous beyond description. Mercifully, the more brutal aspect of this scenario was apparently edited out.Nature is brutal. I personally find little enjoyment in watching predators kill and devour their prey. The baby penguin being torn to pieces by the gull in "March of the Penguins" was unpleasant to watch.Nature films like "Winged Migration" are usually rated G, but one should use caution when showing such films to children. Depending on how sensitive a child may be, some images in nature may prove to be psychologically traumatizing. Fortunately, most film makers of nature know what to edit out when depicting violence in the animal world.The French are good documentary film makers. They know how to capture the beauty found in nature and they can easily be relied upon to reveal its cruelty.

'Winged Migration' is beautiful, immense and ultimately... disappointing.As a British viewer I may have been previously spoilt by the work of the BBC's Natural History Unit which uses similarly mesmirising visuals to far better affect because we learn something about the subjects. The minimal narration of this film teaches us nothing of the birds, so after the first half hour of soaring geese and gannets diving to the harmonic tones celtic/Gothic choirs, it began to get rather boring, and I say this a bird enthusiast. The stunning visuals might take your breath away and make you marvel at the truly amazing journeys the birds annually undertake, but how much more impressive the birds might have seemed if there was a narration informing of the distances involved, or that birds perhaps born only eight weeks earlier manage to complete them. If on the other hand you want to switch your brain off, and relax to pretty pictures for an hour and a half, this is your movie. It's like muzak. It's an alternative to taking a herbal bath. So far as parents are concerned, unless you're personally capable of providing your children with information about the birds, they'll get just as bored as I did. Finally the staged scenes, primarily the frequent use of imprinted birds, which might not be obvious to most viewers, raises questions about how far wildlife documentary filmmakers should go in their portrayal of the truth. If you initially understand that the flight sequences are being filmed from a microlight the birds have been specially bred and trained to follow, it gets rather annoying after the first couple of scenes to see yet another wild species coerced that way by the filmmakers. The truth in this film, much like the birds, is manipulated to produce a superficial and oblivious illustration of what are remarkable creatures.Try David Attenborough's, The Life of Birds, instead. All the beauty and explanations too.

The cast seems to be very, very comfortable with the camera. I don't know what the director has done to achieve this. I'll take a quick glance around to find out. Oh, so he used professional actors. Good choice. Takes a lot of effort, too - something that must be appreciated.The costume designer must've been smoking something. The designs are in some cases utterly, outrageously unconvincing and inconsistent.The script, then. There are just too many characters. No one gets enough attention. There should've perhaps been less characters. Moreover, it almost seems they aren't even connected to each other. The movie lacks a clear protagonist, a centerpiece. Of the ensemble, the Canadian chaps seem to have a bit more screen time than most. The others do get their moment in the spotlight, and deservedly so. Also featured are very brief but powerful cameos from P. J. Squirrel and Randy Warthog, among others.This paragraph has been designed to be a bridge between the two halves of this comment. I trust you'll notice what changes.I watched a version cut into a two-part miniseries and with Finnish narration, so I can only speak about that. (No penguins! Now, where the penguins? The runtime seems to be the same, though, so I don't know...) It isn't very informative. Eero Saarinen's voice stated such facts as "it is not for aesthetic reasons that the birds fly in formation". Mm-hmm.Some bad-quality video shots - if I have seen correctly - here and there and the ill-chosen music almost ruined my awe at points. I didn't notice the much talked-about CGI shots. Maybe there were none in this version.But the visuals... Simply stated, they are breath-taking, particularly during the airborne scenes, as you'd imagine. One four-second shot of a (excuse me while I consult my dictionary) stork above the Pyrenees alone is worth it.